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The best would be to say they were smart and lucky. They were lucky that the competition delayed getting a product to catch on. They were smart to quickly get to market a product that would catch on. This is the way the world works: having the luck to be in the right place at the right time and then having the ability to get the most from that opportunity.

It's pretty basic economics, I learned it in the introduction to microeconomics course I took.

The simple model is that a producer is going to use the marginal revenue (the revenue from making one more unit) and the marginal cost (the cost to make one more unit) and where these two intersect is when the money brought in will be less than the cost to produce. The demand curve is then used to set the price from the number of units produced.

Normal theory only uses the marginal cost and the demand curves to determine the number produced and the price, which will always be a lower price and more produced than the method above because with the standard method, the number of units produced is set to where the marginal revenue is zero, which is the break even point.

No one wants to break even, they want to maximize profit, so everything costs more than it does to produce. This results in less production and higher costs.

Don't forget that the FCC also will monitor, fine, and prosecute anyone who uses licensed spectrum without a license. Otherwise, someone, say me, could just put up an antenna in my home and easily make no cellphone work within a mile (oh yeah, I live in a city). There is no other way to create a contract that would bind every single person from setting up interfering equipment (either on purpose or accident).

Though, this is not to say the cost of monitoring and pursuing unlicensed broadcasters is as much as the fees, but it must be included in any economic analysis as it does add value to the spectrum.

I think if there was a bad implementation, that the government wasn't getting their fingers into, they would be opening themselves up to lawsuits that would hopefully crumble the company.

Big businesses are likely to start using these to encrypt confidential data on laptops, maybe even desktops. So if they find out through a data leak via one of these drives and it's not encrypting with the encryption advertised and that's what lead to the leak, then the drive maker is going to get sued for the cost of the leak, the cost to replace every single drive the company used (possibly with a competitor's), and probably some more on top of that for being so stupid. Oh, and then every other business customer will sue to have all their drives replaced with ones that will actually protect their data.

Think of companies like Microsoft or IBM finding out the huge number of drives they bought for every single laptop they have isn't actually protecting the data they need by law to protect.

I would only worry that the manufacturer or the government has a backdoor because the government would probably protect the manufacturer then.

The whole DHMO thing is really an unfair example, as it involves misleading scare tactics (100% of people who consume it die, for example). That's not presenting an opposing idea and letting people come to their own conclusion, but rather intentionally presenting well-known facts in extremely misleading and overcomplicated ways in an attempt to trick them.

Which people do, sometimes intentionally, sometimes just because of the natural bias people have to look at what pleases them. I think it's necessary to teach people to actually think about not only what their being told, but how their being told it. A fact not only has to be true, it has to be meaningful.

You're dealing with some application programmed by cavemen that insists on having a disk (or swap) to write things to and the clever (yet still moronic) programmers decided to check whether you are trying to cheat. I've delt with some pretty shitty programs, so I don't doubt it's happened.

Let's bootstrap moon production. Why lug tons of materials up there when we could figure out how to build most of what we want using materials already present on the moon. Leave the expensive task of cargo hauling to components that would cost too much to get the manufacturing equipment there. Let's see if we can get a near self sustaining habitation there before we think of sending more people.